Adolescents 8/18 at Galaxy Theatre

Friday night I went with Lisa Fancher to see the Adolescents, Street Dogs, Vacancies and Wrecking Crew at the Galaxy Theatre in Santa Ana, CA. Oh yeah, did I fail to mention I’m “on tour” and am out in CA? I guess I’ll have to do another MXV update soon. After driving through some massively shitty traffic and stopping by the Ed Colver exhibit, we went over to the club, which aside from being a pretty nice place, has its own parking lot and it was free parking!

Wrecking Crew

Wrecking Crew

After finding a nice table to sit at and having some drinks (thanks Lisa!), the show got started. The first band up was Wrecking Crew. Since they couldn’t be bothered to take the two minutes it would have taken to do a google search to find out the name Wrecking Crew was already used by a punk rock band before, I can’t be bothered to describe them, or even find a link to whatever website they may have.

Vacancies

Vacancies

Next up were The Vacancies and they were just the same as they were when I saw them two week ago in Chicago. They didn’t do a whole lot for me last time and this time the only difference was them not playing the Dead Boys cover. So for that alone, they were better this time around playing only their original material with a substitute drummer who just joined them that afternoon.

Street Dogs

Street Dogs

The Street Dogs were next and much like in Chicago, the kids went nuts for them. Also much like in Chicago, their cheap-pop tactics of including “insert city here” into their songs and pandering to the crowd like at an arena rock concert, made them come across as cheesy and phony. They obviously want to be rock stars really bad and must have taken lessons from Kiss concerts as to how to “work the crowd”. They once again did lame covers of Black Flag and Sham 69 songs and once again it was unnecessary. I am pretty sure they even dedicated songs to “the troops” and also to the “street dogs army”. Isn’t there a Kiss Army? Apparently they are incapable of coming up with any original gimmicks. While I found their original stuff last time to be rather mediocre but unoffensive, this time having seen just how cheesy they are with all the attempts for a cheap pop, I’m strongly against them.

Adolescents

Adolescents

This just left the Adolescents. They played a similar set list as they did a couple weeks ago, but this time it was longer and they had more time to talk to the crowd. The crowd went nuts, and was easily three times larger than the one in Chicago. They played all the “hits” except for “Welcome to Reality” which really bummed me out. They seemed to have more energy this time out though, plus Frank Agnew was playing with them since it was back in their homeland. I’m really glad I got to see them play again at a much better venue and it was well worth flying out to CA earlier in order to catch the show!

Adolescents

Adolescents

Hopefully these make up for the poor photos of the last show! More photos after the jump.

Street Dogs

Adolescents